I have no idea about that being an advantage or even making only a difference.
In an ordinary "service offered" the "workers" get some money from the "employers" in exchange for some work done.
This money is then spent for "good" things needed by the workers or their families like rent, food, fuel, etc. OR for "bad" things like - say - alcohol, drugs, betting, etc. without the "employers" having any control on it.
The "moral" aspect is completely missing, while in your version somehow you introduce it, but only because of a "preliminary story", that may (or may not) be true.
So, you have two "workers" offering the same services, let's say dog sitting, for the same amount of money, let's say 20$ per hour, the first one's story is "I need money for rent.", the other one's is "I need the money to help pay medical bills for my mother".
Do you choose one or you flip a coin?
And what happens when a third one asks for 18$ per hour saying "I need the money to buy a ticket for <insert name here> concert"?
Besides renaming "workers" to "Creators" and "employers" to "Supporters", isn't it like "services offered" on a traditional newspaper classified ad column?
In consumer products there is no real connection between costs and prices, what happens is that for a given item the final consumer price is set to whatever it is considered affordable by a large enough amount of people in the targeted niche.
Then how much it costs is secundary, it is the price that is fixed.
The difference between the costs and the price is the company's margin, one company may be clever and have 30% margins, another one may be less clever and have 5% or -10% (and will soon close) but the price remains fixed.
The 1/2/4 another member posted about is only a quick approximation, the 4 is fixed the 1 is irrelevant (to the retailer) the 2 is what may vary, if it becomes (say) 2.5 because of the return policy, the retailer will eat the reduced margin until, little by little, the price can be raised to 4.1, 4.2, 4.3, etc.
The inverse (reducing final price because the 2 became 1.5) never happens.
Competition may lower the price for a number of reasons (reduced margin because increased volumes as an example), but it is still largely independent from costs.
I may be wrong but if there is a percentage as high as 30-40% of items that are returned and that cannot be resold to other customers and are either liquidated or destroyed, the (greedy) corporation has already raised all prices 50% higher than what would be possible if there wasn't such waste.
At the end of the day customers are the ones that pay for that, if they are happy, it's fine of course.
But if you compare data transfer speed of an IDE 33 rotating hard disk against a SATA (or better Nvme) SSD, and then, once data is transferred from storage you managed it in what amount of (much slower) RAM (at the most in 8 Mb in Win 3.x times, probably 48 or 96 Mb with win 9x, 128 or 256 Mb on NT 4.00 or 2K, while nowadays it is 4/8/16 Gb) and on a single core processor, running at 100-1000 Mhz, while nowadays you have likely minimum 4 cores runnning at 3,000 or something like that.
Sure you had splash screens, the sheer fact that you could open a spreeadsheet amd make some calculations (often with automatic calculation disabled and thus pressing F9 manually to re-calculate) was (IMHO) a miracle in Windows 3.x times.
This is a pet peeve of mine but today developers should be (only for testing their programs) be given the lowest powered machines available, connected to the same (shitty) internet connection a large part of the future users of the programs actually experience and see directly why their programs/tools/websites/whatever are laggish/slowish for their customers.
I remember a HP machine (@600Mhz) which my company bought circa 2001 that came with an install CD that had both NT 4.00 and Windows 2000 and the user could decide to install the one or the other, a few machines had initially NT 4.00 due to some accounting software that did not run (for whatever reasons) on Windows 2000, while some had 2K installed.
Of course the NT 4.0 was a bit faster, but not that much with "common" programs (Office and similar).
The occupation on disk of the OS was however 3x (NT 4.00 was around 180 MB, 2K around 650 MB).
Possibly the supplier was talking of hardware failures.
The issue here (as it was several years ago with the re-known Seagate 7200.11 issue [0]) is not about the odds of multiple (hardware) failures together (which may actually be a very rare case), in these case it is essentially a software failure, a counter that crashes the on-disk operating system (if we can call it so) be it an overflow of the counter or hitting a certain value.
The chances of having almost simultaneous failures is near to certainty for drives that are booted the same number of times and have been powered for the same number of hours, if the affected counters are related to these events.
This condition was introduced by a firmware issue that sets the drive event log to an invalid location causing the drive to become inaccessible.
The firmware issue is that the end boundary of the event log circular buffer (320) was set incorrectly. During Event Log initialization, the boundary condition that defines the end of the Event Log is off by one. During power up, if the Event Log counter is at entry 320, or a multiple of (320 + x*256), and if a particular data pattern (dependent on the type of tester used during the drive manufacturing test process) had been present in the reserved-area system tracks when the drive's reserved-area file system was created during manufacturing, firmware will increment the Event Log pointer past the end of the event log data structure. This error is detected and results in an "Assert Failure", which causes the drive to hang as a failsafe measure. When the drive enters failsafe further update s to the counter become impossible and the condition will remain through subsequent power cycles. The problem only arises if a power cycle initialization occurs when the Event Log is at 320 or some multiple of 256 thereafter. Once a drive is in this state, there is no path to resolve/recover existing failed drives without Seagate technical intervention. For a drive to be susceptible to this issue, it must have both the firmware that contains the issue and have been tested through the specific manufacturing process.
Still, as a non-programmer, if everything is so "easy" isn't it surprising that there are very few actually working (free/low cost) JPEG recovery/repair programs?
A very minor corruption in the file and poof you can retrieve nothing.
Many years ago there was a single program[1] that could, in a very small subset of cases, "fix" corrupted JPEG files (manually/inteactively), now (AFAIK) there is almost only [2] and [3] and this (service) [4] that actually produce (in some cases) good results.
In my (admitted) ignorance on the matter, I would have expected that with progresses like increased computer power, AI, deep fakes or whatever the problem by now was - if not solved - at least solved in a number of subset of cases.
The amount of small but needed tools/drivers/patches/workarounds R.Loew produced is so relevant that we can say that he almost single handedly prolonged Windows 9x/Me life for several years.
Can't say if it applies to your case, but as a firewall/router I use a "thin client" with a TransMeta processor, the actual model is Fujitsu Futro S, there are/were several sub-models, mine is an old S220, it runs Zeroshell (a Linux distro) with an added "normal" PCI network cards and it is like 15W:
If we can for a moment digress from light bulbs, I have had recently some experience with (el-cheapo) led panels, those that can be inserted in ceilings (false ceilings), they can be either round or square and are typically 12 W (around 17 cm diameter) and 18 W (around 22 cm in diameter), there are even larger ones (24 W/30 cm diameter).
They make a very good amount of light, like 1100 lumens for the 12 W and 1650 lumens for the 18 W, and have a separate "led driver", constant current, 280-300 mA, voltage 36-72 V for the 12/18 W driver and 54 - 96 V for the 18/24 W driver.
They can be found everywhere for anything between 4 and 10 Euro each.
It is now three years I installed some 60 of them (in a restaurant/hotel, think no less than 10 h/day on for 300 days/year) and 15-20% of them failed in the last few months.
In ALL of them the faulty part is the "driver" (which basically is a transformer and a rectifier plus a current limiting chip and a capacitor, which seemingly is the actual component that always fails[1]), spares (a new driver) can be luckily be found for 2 or 3 Euro each, the actual leds are perfect.
I cannot see why it is not in production a male/female E27 attachment containing a "driver" and a "driverless" bulb to match.
The amount of electronics thrown away would at least halve.
Yep, but still the amount of kids "roaming free" is far less what used to be (Italy here), in the old days (I am talking og the '70's) - with some due exceptions - after school we had lunch, spent maybe 1 hour doing homework and then (from the age of 6 or 7) "roamed free", usually on bycicles, till there was enough light (or the time was a quarter to 20:00, whatever came first).
A as a side note, most kids wore shorts until roughly 13, the long trousers were reserved to "official" occasions, holiday visits to relatives, (rare) lunches at the restaurants, and similar.
And it was not common to see a kid with both knees not-bruised or non-orange, a much used item was, besides hydrogen peroxide, mercurochrome.
Yeah, is telling that modern keyboards weight a lot less nowadays, and nobody would use one as a weapon to hit someone else. ;)
The original IBM Model M was 2.3 Kg.